Desire Street A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans

A SHOT RINGS OUT in a New Orleans parking lot and a routine purse snatching turns deadly. Within two days the law has a bead on a twenty-five-year-old suspect: a hustler, a father, a ladies' man, a thief, and a fence. For the police and for District Attorney Harry Connick, the stakes are high. New Orleans is in the crosshairs of the global media as the site of the 1984 World's Fair, and Connick is a week away from a citywide vote on his bid for re-election. Less than three months-and two trials-later, Curtis Kyles is sentenced to death for the murder of a sixty-year-old white woman named Delores Dye. Kyles had spent fourteen years in Louisiana's hellish prisons when, in the late 1990s, he walked free-to howls of disgust from a community convinced of his guilt. How he disentangled himself from his legal snares is as astonishing as the zealousness of the prosecutors who took him to trial another three times after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the original conviction. In the official version of the case, the murder is seen as the work of an urban predator-a young man with a gun to the head of a defenseless woman. But over time, as witnesses grow stale and courtroom tactics lose their punch, another reality begins to emerge, a tableau with three figures. One is Kyles. Another is Pinkey, the woman who bore him five children. The third is an acquaintance of theirs-a man in the grip of sexual obsession and drug addiction. Was Kyles framed? Or did an informant lead police, however deviously, to the right man? With a compelling narrative that has been compared to In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Desire Street takes readers deep into the underworld of America's most exotic and duplicitous city in search of the truth about Delores Dye's murder and about the fascinating-and troubling-man who was sent to death row for it.Horne, Jed is the author of 'Desire Street A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans', published 2005 under ISBN 9780374138257 and ISBN 0374138257.